Re: GNU ELPA package discoverability

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 19.05.2020 06:59, Richard Stallman wrote:
> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>    > > Better in which sense?  Do you mean, better for you in maintaining the
>    > > package?
>
>    > As explained in another email: better discoverability. Better at helping
>    > the users notice the package.
>
>    > Simply including a file in the Emacs distro doesn't do much.
>
> Do people have any concrete suggestions for how to improve this?

We do have an existing solution, actually. We add a number of core 
packages to GNU ELPA with a special annotation that makes it build and 
distribute the versions currently in Emacs master branch. Then they also 
show up in 'M-x list-packages'. There's some organizational overhead 
associated with that choice, but in any case, as a result, the author 
reaps all the benefits associated with being in ELPA as well.

So, to take a step back, what I'm saying is, adding a package to the 
core doesn't automatically makes things _worse_ for the author, in terms 
of the eventual popularity of the package. It's just that, if they added 
the package to GNU ELPA, they already enjoy the vast majority of the 
benefits.

And if we create a "blessed" subsection of GNU ELPA which we pay more 
attention to, review and promote on the official Emacs website, the 
reasons to push into the core will diminish further, for most packages.